05 February 2017 1:03 AM

In British public life, nothing succeeds like failure, provided you belong to the Blessed Company of the Politically Correct. We learn from media leaks that two politically correct women, Cressida Dick, pictured right and Sara Thornton, pictured below, in hat, are on the final shortlist for the post of Metropolitan Police Commissioner. Although we are supposed not to care any longer what sex anyone is, those in charge of this appointment no doubt long to choose the ‘first woman’ to hold the job. And if they do, they will be applauded wildly by the Left-wing establishment. I am more interested in whether these people are up to the job, regardless of sex, which is surely the truly anti-sexist position. Let’s see what happens. Whoever holds this post has a huge and lasting influence over policing throughout the country. He or she will have the ear of Ministers and immense media access. Other forces will strive to copy what they do. But if either Ms Dick or Ms Thornton were politically incorrect white-skinned males, I do not think they would be in the competition at all. No doubt both are perfectly pleasant people, well educated and charming. They are beloved by the BBC’s Woman’s Hour, have been decorated with medals and invited to Royal occasions. But both are personally linked to gigantic and undoubted police failures. Ms Dick was ‘Gold Commander’ in charge of the 2005 ‘operation’ in which the wholly innocent Jean Charles de Menezes was mistakenly shot dead on the London Underground after officers wrongly assumed he was a terrorist. After this she was repeatedly promoted to higher positions before being transferred to the Foreign Office for some lofty function.Ms Thornton was in charge of Thames Valley Police when they were inexcusably slow to act against a gang of men who subjected several young girls to appalling sexual abuse in Oxford. In March 2015, Maggie Blyth, of the Oxfordshire Safeguarding Children Board, who had compiled a report on the episode, said: ‘It is shocking that these children were subjected to such appalling sexual exploitation for so long.’ She spoke of ‘a culture across all organisations that failed to see that these children were being groomed in an organised way by groups of men’. Ms Thornton responded: ‘We are ashamed of the shortcomings identified in this report and we are determined to do all we can to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.’No doubt. But, like Ms Dick’s problems, it did not affect her climb to the top. Asked if she had considered resigning, she said: ‘The focus has got to be moving forward. I think the focus for me is on driving improvements in the future.’ By then she was already on her way to take up a post as head of the new National Police Chiefs’ Council.I know little of Ms Thornton. I live in the area whose policing she used to head. Until this newspaper made a fuss, her organisation was reluctant to provide escorts for the hearses bearing dead soldiers home from Afghanistan, which passed through her area.But otherwise, it is no more absent and reactive than any other police ‘service’ I know of, which isn’t saying much. As for Ms Dick, she was on her way to the summit from the start. She was sent on a ‘national police high-flyers’ course’ in the 1980s. There she wrote a dissertation, arguing that ‘the way Lady Thatcher used the police to crush the miners had undermined public support, by creating the impression that the police had been reduced to the status of political tools’.

As a senior officer in Oxford, she preferred to withdraw rather than disperse demonstrators who had blocked a major road by holding an all-day rave. She said that there were children among the protesters and ‘although people were breaking the law and causing disruption we let it go ahead’. In 2002, as the Metropolitan Police ‘Diversity Director’, she launched a poster campaign in London urging the public to report to the police those whose views they found hateful.For many years I have tried to point out that the public don’t want or need this sort of policing, and long only for a force that is visible on the streets and deters the crime and disorder that now affect so many. Nobody listens, just as nobody listened to all the other points I and others patiently made for years about (for example) education, drugs, immigration and the EU. Those who ignore these warnings will, in the end, face an explosion of wrath which will make Donald Trump look like Woody Allen. And then, no doubt, they’ll all go out on petulant, sweary demonstrations complaining about the thing they have themselves helped to create. It’ll be too late.

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Bellowing at the wrong villain

Ministers and others continue to shout and squawk about Russia, a poor, weak country which is no threat to us, and which isn’t even especially interested in us. Is this because they lack the guts to tackle the giant, rich bully China, whose despots are entertained in Buckingham Palace?

I’ve seen no sign of any toughness over China’s blatant and lawless kidnap, from his Hong Kong home, of the billionaire Xiao Jianhua. Peking’s secret police appear to have waltzed across the border from the mainland and snatched him away. This is only the latest such incident, along with plenty of other crude and menacing interference in the former British colony.

China agreed in a solemn treaty in 1997 to respect Hong Kong as a separate territory until 2047. It seems to me they have decided we are now so weak they don’t need to bother.

Making militant and belligerent speeches about Russia is no substitute for real diplomatic courage.

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Hurrah for the broadcaster Jeremy Vine, like me a cyclist, for standing up to a bullying driver who treated him like a second-class citizen. She’s now been convicted and may face prison.

I think it’s thanks to another broadcasting Jeremy, this time Jeremy Clarkson, that so many drivers think cyclists ‘shouldn’t be on the road as they don’t pay road tax’. I’ve had this nonsense said to me by drivers who’ve treated me with similar dangerous bad manners.

Not all of them behave as badly as the woman who threatened Jeremy Vine. But they need to learn that cyclists pay just as much tax as they do, quite possibly more, and that they need space and consideration.

In my view, nobody should be allowed a driving licence until he has ridden a bike in city traffic and seen what his behaviour looks and feels like.

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Since Saving Private Ryan, war films have spared us very little of the gruesome truth about battle, which turns out to be disgusting and shameful and not glorious at all.

Now Mel Gibson’s new film Hacksaw Ridge confuses the matter even more, showing the exploits of a deeply Christian American, Desmond Doss (played by Andrew Garfield), who volunteered to serve as a medic – but not fight – in the Pacific.

It’s based on a true story. Doss, portrayed left in the movie, wouldn’t carry a rifle into combat, but rescued an astonishing number of his wounded comrades from under Japanese guns.

He even saved Japanese lives. But as far as I could see, he would have saved more lives if he’d been willing to carry and use a firearm. And in any case his efforts were tiny compared to the vast butchery all around him.

It just made me wonder more than I ever had before, exactly why there was a war against Japan (which, until the Americans forced us apart in 1923, was Britain’s close ally).

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07 August 2014 1:58 PM

After the folly comes the cost. We know about the lives, ended or ruined ( and any who know anything about the period know how devastating that loss was, not least because our army, alone in Europe, was initially made up of volunteers, by their nature the best we had).

Most of what follows is taken from Adam Tooze’s ‘The Deluge’ undoubtedly the history book of the year. It is far more important and revelatory than Christopher Clark’s weirdly popular pro-German volume ‘The Sleepwalkers’, which diminishes the blame most historians have rightly attached to Germany since Fritz Fischer’s devastating work 60 years ago.

If Germany hadn’t wanted war with Russia, there would have been no war in 1914. France might have been disappointed, but France wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to create a war where none was needed. And the pro-war faction in Britain were willing to seize what they madly thought was an opportunity, but also would never have engineered a war out of nothing. The poor old Russians were simply manoeuvred into a gigantic elephant trap, out of which they are still trying to heave themselves a century afterwards.

I was amused on Wednesday to see that a German historian has doubts about Christopher Clark’s book. Gerd Krumreich, Professor of Modern history at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, has been attacking Professor Clark’s book, saying in the French magazine ‘L’Express’ ‘Clark likes Germans too much…He lets them off the hook and tells them their ancestors are less to blame than the Russians, Serbs and French. And the general public loves to rediscover a past which is now no longer to be deemed corrupted.’

It’s all still alive, you see. The ghosts of Bethmann Hollweg, the Kaiser, Ludendorff, Friedrich Naumann and the rest of them still walk. But only those who understand the game that was played in 1914 can see clearly that it is still being played now, in the twice-devastated bloodlands of Ukraine.

Adam Tooze’s main theme is the triumph of the USA, not just over Britain (which it indebted, out-gunned and replaced) but over the whole pre-1914 order. This wasn’t just a US victory, but a transformation. What the USA (especially Woodrow Wilson) wanted was a tamed world in which old-fashioned great power rivalries would no longer mess everything up and get in the way of its dominance.

By idiotically going to war (for no discernible purpose) in 1914, Britain gave Washington the opportunity to achieve this. The process, interrupted by the great depression and the 1939 war, was completed in 1941-48 by Placentia Bay, Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, NATO and the first moves towards European Union. Tooze doesn’t say this, or probably even think it, but my own conclusion from what he writes is that, without the 1914 war, the USA would have had to contrive a war against Britain to get what it gained from our suicidal policy.

It seems to me that such a war would have been very hard to contrive. Even Britain’s political class, who emerge in history, repeatedly, as being none too bright, might have seen the risks of a war with the United States.

The book itself is so rewarding in so many ways that I can only advise readers to get hold of it and read it themselves. I shall concentrate here on those aspects of it which emphasize the stupidity of our entry into war in 1914, and the still greater stupidity of our refusal to get out of it before it was too late.

The first thing is the economic devastation which it caused. Tooze understands that the figures must never be neglected. All the combatants, he recounts on p.36, began the war with strong credit balances, specially by today’s rackety standards.

But not for long. By 1916 things were very different. Tooze gives a fascinating explanation of how the war was financed by Britain, France and Russia, and how this gradually turned into an enormous unpayable debt owned by Britain to the USA (the battle of the Somme was actually financed by American loans).

This debt was so huge that it remains unpaid to this day, perhaps the biggest single sign of our national fall from power and importance, one of the largest national defaults in world history, yet widely unknown in Britain (where many people mistakenly think it was paid off, because the 1939-45 debt has been) and not referred to in polite society.

and meanwhile the USA was taking advantage of its neutrality to ensure that it was equipped for the global power that we were ceding with every shipment of gold and securities across the Atlantic. As Tooze says (p.37) ‘The most powerful states in Europe became dependent on foreign creditors’ .In 1916, the year of Jutland (which everyone recalls), Woodrow Wilson authorized a huge expansion plan for the US Navy (which nobody recalls), saying to his aide Colonel House ‘let us build a navy bigger than [Britain’s] and do what we please’(p.35). In the same summer, France’s credit nearly collapsed under the strain of Verdun.

In October 1916 (p.51), a huge Sterling crisis was caused by Wilson’s unwillingness to authorize a new and enormous loan to the allies. Wilson was trying to stop the war – and he was not taking sides. In fact, the idea that the USA intervened on the side of the Allies has always been wrong. The USA joined the war to fight for itself, not to get Britain’s or France’s chestnuts out of the fire – hence its insistence on its troops being under its own control.

The whole chapter ‘Peace without Victory’ is a tremendous tour de force, and a great revelation to any who still think that the USA rode to aid of its cousins out of benevolence or sentimentality. Wilson wanted to overtake Britain, pacify Europe and inaugurate a new world order. He also, by this time, wanted to safeguard his country’s huge investment in the allied war effort, which would go down the plughole if Germany won(it was destined to go down the plughole anyway, but he wasn’t to know that).

But the fond and foolish idea that ‘America came in late’ to a quarrel in which it ought to have been a participant from the start, is sentimental drivel. The USA, like any rationally-governed nation, entered the war only when it had to, for hard-headed calculated reasons of its own advantage.

Brest-Litovsk brings Mitteleuropa into being – the roots of today’s Ukraine war

As I keep pointing out, the real war in Europe was always between Germany and Russia. everything else was secondary. And in 1917, Germany had beaten Russia, entirely thanks to Ludendorff’s employment of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and the Bolsheviks' willingness to act as German agents against their native land (which was by then a liberal republic, not a Tsarist autocracy).

So came the 1917-1918 talks at Brest-Litovsk (I have been to the ruined fortress where this gigantic event happened, and it is still scarred and riven by the terrific bombardment it withstood in 1941 during an eight-day siege by Hitler’s forces).

Germany, by December 1917, was by no means a simple autocracy. Liberal nationalists, indeed liberal imperialists of the Naumann type, were still very influential, had in fact reasserted their power, and everyone was scared of mutiny among the working class and the armed forces after the Russian revolution. The country was slowly starving under our blockade. Yet it appeared to be winning the war.

Germany didn’t want an old-fashioned empire of obviously conquered, subject peoples. Tact was to be applied. On p.113, Tooze writes ( referring to our old friend Naumann) about a ‘proposed ‘zone of German hegemony in central Europe, based on some kind of federative imperialism’.

‘Hegemony’ is a great word for avoiding the central ‘Who,Whom’ question, isn’t it? (you can always find out the answer to that by checking the treaties, the banknotes and the borders, after all). And I do love ‘federative imperialism’. The phrase seems to me to describe a certain large supranational body now swallowing most of Western, eastern and central Europe.

But here is the bit I most treasure (again on p,113) ‘Once Tsarist power collapsed in 1917and America entered the war, it was obvious to the more intelligent strategic thinkers in Germany that there was no better means to dynamite the Tsarist Empire than for Berlin to espouse the demand for self-determination’. A mild version of this had already been tried in Poland in 1916, when Berlin and Vienna had tried to harness Polish nationalism by setting up a puppet ‘Kingdom of Poland’. The invading Germans, entering Russian-ruled parts of Poland, had portrayed themselves as liberators.

The Bolsheviks, still in their utopian phase, rashly agreed to this ‘self-determination’, an error they and their rougher less Utopian Stalinist successors spent many years putting right by violent reconquest of land, much of which (especially Ukraine) had been ‘self-determined’ into German, er, hegemony.

Tooze (pp114-115) says the German liberal imperialists were not just being cynical. ‘They believed that history refuted the choice, supposed by simplistic advocates of nationalism, between slavery and full, unfettered sovereignty. For most, full sovereignty was always a chimera. Even neutrality was an option only under exceptional circumstances’…

‘..for most, the real choice was one between hegemons. The Baltic states, if broken away from Russia, would inevitably fall into the orbit of another great power, if not Germany or Russia, then Britain. What the more far-sighted strategists in Imperial Germany were advancing was a vision of negotiated sovereignty in which economic and military independence was pooled by smaller states with larger states’.

Once again, does this sound familiar?

So will the increasingly violent struggles which followed over the status of Ukraine, with its vital strategic position, and its grain and coal (By the way, the adventures and travels of Ludendorff during this period would make a novel).

And they call this ‘The Special Relationship’

I’ll end (reluctantly, for there are so many other enthralling parts of this book, including its exploration of allied intervention in Bolshevik Russia, Versailes, Keynes, the momentous cession of British power at the Washington naval conference, as huge as any of Mikhail Gorbachev’s retreats from Superpower status, the beginnings of modern China) with the devastating material on America’s real attitude towards Britain.

On pp 268-9 you will find Woodrow Wilson, on his way to Europe, saying atht America ‘will build the biggest navy in the world, matching theirs [Britain’s]and exceeding it…and if they would not limit it, there would come another and more terrible and bloody war and England would be wiped off the face of the map’.

Then , by the end of March 1919 ‘ relations between the naval officers of the two sides had degenerated to such an extent that the admirals threatened war and had to be restrained from assaulting each other’ .

On page 192 you will find a description of Washington’s first known direct interference in the internal affairs of the United Kingdom. On page 395 you will find

US Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes raging and shouting at Britain’s ambassador in Washington, Auckland Geddes, that America had saved Britain’s bacon and we had better be grateful from now on.

In a voice rising to a scream, Mr Hughes declared: ‘You would not be here to speak for Britain – you would not be speaking anywhere, England would not be able to speak at all!

'It is the Kaiser who would be heard, if America – seeking nothing for herself but to save England – had not plunged into the war and won it!’

And on page 240, you will find words from Woodrow Wilson that should be engraved over the door of the British Ambassador’s study in Washington DC. These words were not privately spoken, as were the other quotations and events above, but for public consumption. They are the words of a master gently shoving away an over-affectionate and excessively servile dog, with the toe of his polished shoe:

‘You must not speak of us who come over here as cousins, still less as brothers; we are neither. Neither must you think of us as Anglo-Saxons, for that term can no longer be rightly applied to the people of the US. Nor must too much importance in this connection be attached to the fact that English is our common language …no, there are only two things which can establish and maintain closer relations between your country and mine: they are community of ideals and of interests’.

And, of course, where such ideals and interests clash, we know whose will prevail.

Was the disappearance of our wealth, power and pre-eminence fore-ordained and unavoidable? I do not think so. For certain, it needn’t have been so quick. And if Burns and Morley, rather than Grey and Asquith, had prevailed in Cabinet in August 1914, I believe we would live in a better world by far than the one we live in now.

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03 August 2014 1:14 AM

A century ago, stupid and vainglorious politicians dragged us into war. We started it as a great, rich empire and ended it as an indebted husk.

Soon afterwards, America’s President Woodrow Wilson told aides he would wipe Britain ‘off the face of the map’ in another ‘terrible and bloody war’ unless we ceded our naval supremacy.

And US Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes raged and shouted at Britain’s ambassador in Washington, Auckland Geddes, that America had saved Britain’s bacon and we had better be grateful from now on.

In a voice rising to a scream, Mr Hughes declared: ‘You would not be here to speak for Britain – you would not be speaking anywhere, England would not be able to speak at all!

'It is the Kaiser who would be heard, if America – seeking nothing for herself but to save England – had not plunged into the war and won it!’

These little-known but important facts should be borne in mind as we look back on this dreadful episode. I for one have had enough of war poets and trench memoirs. Let’s have some proper history – who did what to whom and what it cost.

As Simon Heffer explains on the previous pages, the war was the greatest event in modern history, its aftershocks still persisting even now.

By the way, we didn’t even go to war to save Belgium. The Cabinet had already decided on war before a single German jackboot had crossed the Belgian border.

The rape of Belgium – which we weren’t actually obliged to defend – was a pretext invented afterwards to soothe readers of The Guardian.

Have our leaders learned anything from this episode of folly, mass death and waste? Absolutely not.

They still reach for war at the slightest opportunity. Everyone knows now (I did at the time) that our Iraq adventure was stupid and wrong, and that we had no business in Afghanistan.

But I can well remember being told off sternly for not supporting David Cameron’s war in Libya, supposedly waged to prevent a fictional massacre and some fictional rapes. Only a few weeks ago I was still being told the same story.

Well, Libya is now in flames, British Embassy staff are fleeing the country and the place is far too dangerous for anyone to go there and report on it. Massacres can proceed with impunity, and refugees head unhindered to Italy – and eventually here – in their thousands.

Let me remind you that Mr Cameron was quick to claim an easy triumph. He told the Commons on September 5, 2011:

‘Some people warned, as Gaddafi himself did, that the Libyan people could not be trusted with freedom; that without Gaddafi there would be chaos.

‘What is emerging now, despite years of repression, and the trauma of recent months, is immensely impressive.’

Compare and contrast what I said here that same week:

‘Just because existing regimes are bad, it does not follow that their replacements will be any better… The test of any revolution comes not as the tyrant falls, but two or three years later, when the new rulers have shown us what they are really like.’

I warned that our Armed Forces were aiding ‘a farcical yet sinister army in pick-up trucks whose aims we don’t even know’.

You might note that, at the time, hardly a voice in so-called mainstream, grown-up media or politics was raised against the Libya folly.

Few (but happily, enough) spoke or wrote against Mr Cameron’s even madder scheme to overthrow the Assad government in Syria.

If we had supported that, we would have found ourselves on the same side as the Islamist fanatics of Isis, now murdering, persecuting and mutilating their way across the Middle East to the terror of all.

It might just be a good moment to wonder if our united national leadership, utterly wrong on every foreign policy issue they have ever faced, are also wrong now, as they march towards what may well end up as war with Russia.

People still don’t grasp how dangerous the conflict in Ukraine already is, or how powerfully Russia believes it has been wronged by an arrogant, aggressive West.

Ukraine’s armed forces, like Israel’s in Gaza, are ruthlessly using artillery and bombs on densely populated areas and will soon be fighting in the million-strong, close-packed city of Donetsk.

The UN estimates 800 civilian deaths and 2,000 civilian wounded so far. The region is riven by the sound of guns, the Guns of August thundering yet again.

It is no mere skirmish. It is a war in the making. Do you really want to join in? This is a dangerous time of year. It will be less dangerous if we refuse to trust our leaders.

Let us have no more moves towards conflict with Moscow without a full recall of Parliament. And let us pray that our MPs are reading some history on their holidays.

Don't paint over Rolf's crimes

I can see why people might want to destroy or blot out paintings and murals by Rolf Harris. But they shouldn’t. Wiping out evidence of past mistakes makes us more likely to repeat them.

Communists do this – the wonderful Café Sybille in East Berlin still preserves half of Stalin’s moustache, which is the only remaining trace of an enormous statue of the monster that was smashed to pieces by order of the state when he fell from favour.

Better by far to remind ourselves that we idolise our fellow creatures, in politics and show business, far too easily, and that the fashions of today often look worse than stupid a few years hence.

They cause rows because such companies have always been feeble about enforcing them. Now they use their own feebleness as an excuse to give up altogether.

Perhaps, if they could make us pay for peace and quiet on trains, they might actually see that the rules were observed.

Does the Tory Party still exist? Subscription income is now lower than Ukip’s. They haven’t published up-to-date membership figures.

My information is that so many have quit in disgust at David Cameron’s liberalism that in many seats there will be no troops to fight the General Election.

Good riddance. I could carve a better party out of a banana.

As a cyclist, I can’t wait for all cars to be driverless. Even the wonkiest driverless car would be safer for the rest of us than the thousands of vehicles whose homicidal drivers are texting or yammering on their mobiles, while the useless police look the other way.

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14 January 2013 1:47 PM

A strange argument has broken out in Whitehall about how we should mark the centenary of the First World War next year. An advisory committee of authors, historians and soldiers is split . Should we commemorate Germany’s defeat as a triumph for good? Should we emphasise the futility and loss? Apparently Sir Hew Strachan, the eminent military historian, wants a frank celebration of victory. The novelist Sebastian Faulks says it should be modest, inclusive and reverential of others’.

First, I’m not sure this is or should be a political decision or a government matter. Let those who take part in solemn commemoration find their own thoughts, rather than be told what to think.

I’d like, most of all, a series of memorial services in the nation’s churches, using only the language, liturgy and music that would have been familiar to those who died and were bereaved (thus making sure that expressions such as ‘inclusive’ didn’t feature). Almost all of them were serious Christian believers, and we owe them a serious Christian ceremony even if we cannot live up to their levels of faith and devotion.

Part of me would like to see an immense, sombre, dawn-to-dusk march-past through the centre of London, representing the time it would have taken for the British dead to pass through the capital.

And I would urge a national effort to get by heart Edward Thomas’s ‘Easter 1915’ (the one that opens with the words ‘The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood’), which I have long thought was the best of all the war poems, because of the way it gently takes you by the hand and then suddenly, fiercely makes you weep, when you understand what the words ‘now far from home’ actually mean. It dates from the moment the people of Britain began to understand the unique, terrible scale of the losses they were undergoing.

I also think it’s time for a new discussion about Lord Lansdowne’s ignored letter, calling for a negotiated peace which – if heeded – might have prevented the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of Hitler. Perhaps someone could write a counterfactual thriller on the subject.

As someone who never watched a single episode of ‘Blackadder’, and wouldn’t have done if you’d paid me, and as a person who instinctively loathes everything connected with Joan Littlewood, I ought to be on Professor Strachan’s side. But I’m not. It grieves me to admit that this rather crude agitprop drama is broadly right, that the war was a terrible mistake, fought by generals and politicians who had no idea what they were doing for most of the time, and involving the stupid and wasteful deaths of legions of fine men.

But somehow I’d like to separate it from dreary unthinking pacifism. It isn’t always wrong to fight. It is sometimes vital to carry on fighting even when all seems lost. What we need to examine is the competence and abilities, and the thinking, of our political leaders who (as this week’s African adventures illustrate) never cease to be childishly keen on rushing into war, unable to learn how hard it is to get out of wars once you are in them.

Something also needs to be said about journalists, equally willing to rush other people into combat, and to rejoice in reporting it when it happens. The horrible mess we now have in Syria is at least partly the fault of reporters who have oversimplified and romanticised events there.

I am currently plodding through the foothills of Christopher Clark’s majestic new book on the outbreak of the war ‘The Sleepwalkers’ , but I don’t think it is going to persuade me that Germany didn’t start the war (I’m told by Nigel Jones of the Spectator

…that everyone who wanted to know, has known for years (thanks to hard evidence uncovered by Kurt Eisner and Fritz Fischer) that the German Kaiser wanted war and set out to get it, thinking he could win as quickly as Bismarck had done in 1870. And I have to say the ( historically well-known) mysterious destruction of some important German and Austro-Hungarian archives does make you wonder what it was they sought to hide).

I still think the real problem was the rivalry between Germany and France, which could only end in the victory of one or the other, and which, as far as I can see, was bound to end in the triumph of Germany sooner or later. And so it has, and nobody now complains.

I’m amused by the fact that modern liberal opinion ferociously and rather righteously supports the current European Union settlement, which is in all but name the defeat of France by Germany, formalised into a mysterious headless ‘Union’ which never mentions its chief purpose, the institutionalisation of German dominance of Europe, whiel France is allowed to pretend to be a great power.

Germany has learned many things since 1914, but one of the most important of all the things it has learned is tact. Otto von Bismarck had both tact and skill and was able to cement and increase German power without endangering his country, but when Wilhelm II got rid of him, things moved rapidly towards war. German politicians and diplomats couldn’t see the point of Bismarck’s bizarre and sometimes contradictory treaty entanglements with Russia and France which prevented a slide into war.

I suspect they also thought that Russia, rapidly modernising in the pre-1914 age, might one day become a much more effective ally of France, and that they had better got on with their war if they were not to risk a combat on two fronts. And it may also have been that they saw the chance (taken at Brest-Litovsk in 1917) to seize the Ukrainian wheatfields, the Baltic states and the Crimea, which Hitler would later covet and invade. I don’t know. But it seems to make sense.

As in 1939, I cannot for the life of me see why Britain needed to get involved in this, or what good our intervention actually did, to us or to those we claimed to be saving or helping. Clark’s book suggests that the supposed German threat to British naval supremacy was never that serious, which seems to me to have a ring of truth (Why did Germany want supremacy over the oceans anyway? Her interests were eastward and landlocked. The USA were our rivals in that struggle, and the ones who defeated us, too, while we were looking the other way and considering them as our allies). And, once that is taken out of the equation, I really cannot see why it mattered to us that the military verdict of 1870 should be reversed. France alone could not withstand Germany alone. Wouldn’t a clear settlement of this fact have been far more civilised in 1914 than it was in 1940?

France, despite sentimentalism about the Entente Cordiale, had many times been our chief enemy and was our natural rival in the Middle East (fighting between Britain and Vichy France in that region was among the bitterest combat of the Second World War. Anglo-French rivalry in Syria and Palestine was a diplomatic nightmare between the wars , and during the last years of the Palestine mandate, see ‘A Line in the Sand’) . I believe the British chiefs of staff were worried about war with France as recently as the early 1920s, and my former home town, Portsmouth, is amusingly ringed with gigantic, vastly expensive Victorian fortifications built against a French invasion threat of the 1850s. What was our interest in preventing a resolution of the Berlin-Paris quarrel?

Germany’s main interests were continental, and lay to the East. In 1914, Poland and Czechoslovakia, not to mention the Baltic states, didn’t even exist, and Britain didn’t much care whether they did or not. Nor was Britain especially concerned about the Balkans. If Germany did push east, that would weaken Russia, which we did in those days regard as a threat in the Mediterranean and in India. Had we been able to see into the future, we would all have been keen on maintaining the dear old Austro-Hungarian empire, so much nicer than what came after it.

And, as usual, we had no continental-style land army of any size. Lord Roberts, Rudyard Kipling and (through his enjoyable book imagining a German invasion of Britain ‘When William Came’) ‘Saki’ (H.H.Munro) all campaigned for such an army. But they didn’t get anywhere. I used to think they had a point, but I don’t any more. It was too expensive, conflicted with our traditions, would have weakened the navy ( and so exposed the empire to danger) and compelled us to lock it into some sort of formal continental alliance.

Our supposed guarantee to Belgium was not as clear-cut as you might think, nor did our fulfilment of it do much good to Belgium, which would have been a lot better off if it had let the Germans pass through on their way to Paris (almost nobody even knows that Sweden let German troops cross its territory after the occupation of Norway) . It seems to me, too, that France would have been a lot better off if it had been permanently and swiftly defeated in 1914. It would have been spared Verdun, Vichy and the murder of its Jews. Germany would have been spared the blockade, Versailles, Hitler, the Holocaust, the bombing , partition. Russia would have been spared the Bolsheviks, the civil war, Stalin, Barbarossa and all that followed. The Middle East might have remained slothful and untroubled, under a slowly decaying Ottoman rule. And who can say that would not have been a better outcome than the one we have?

The Netherlands, Italy, Scandinavia, Greece and above all (from my point of view) Britain would have been spared many losses and tragedies. The peoples living in Eastern Europe would have passed under different rulers, perhaps, but would probably have survived the century much more happily and more prosperous . The horrible forces released by Bolshevism and by Wilsonian national self-determination would have stayed buried at the bottom of Pandora’s Box. Whatever it was, it was a mistake. Whatever we do, we should not pretend otherwise.

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09 August 2006 6:54 PM

Amid all this talk of the 'Special Relationship' and of Britain's failure to have any impact on the current attempts to bandage together another short-term stand-off in the Middle East, I find myself wondering why so many British people still imagine that America is our fond friend and perpetual ally.

I have lived in the USA and loved it. I like Americans. I am glad of the help the USA have sometimes given us, and not resentful about the times when they have pursued their own interests at our expense. But in two years in Washington DC I found absolutely no evidence of a 'special relationship' between our countries, and never met an American who had heard of it. Great powers always look after themselves first. We did it when we could, and would again if we had the chance.

But I really get tired of the sentimental assumption that we are bound together, and especially of the idea that America 'saved us' in World War Two and we are therefore permanently morally indebted so that we must support them in all they do. What saving there was, was (quite reasonably) self-interested and limited to ensure that we would never again be a diplomatic, military or economic rival. Soviet Russia also received a great deal of American support, and never showed a flicker of gratitude for it ( or for the help we gave them, as I should know, since my father had to slog between Scapa Flow and Murmansk within range of German aircraft and U-boats in 1943 and 1944, convoying aid through freezing, dangerous seas to an ungrateful Comrade Stalin).

So, in an attempt to undermine this silly, soppy belief, here is an account of the British-American War that was never quite fought, though we came surprisingly close to it many times. The 1812-1815 war doesn't really count, since neither side was ready, and neither side really had its heart in the business either. Britain was still busy fighting Bonaparte's France, while American commercial interests were angrily opposed to the cost, and the loss of trade.

But it is worth remembering that the US national anthem is an anti-British hymn dating from this half-forgotten time. It is an account, in verse, of the Royal Navy's unsuccessful bombardment of Baltimore, Maryland. The 'Star-Spangled banner' still waves proudly despite having been ripped and torn by British bullets. The landing of British marines is described as "their foul footsteps' pollution".

The young US Navy did remarkably well in that conflict, defeating the hitherto unbeaten British on too many occasions. A superb description of the terrible duel off Boston between HMS Shannon and USS Chesapeake (in which the Royal Navy recovered its honour) is to be found in Patrick O'Brian's "Fortune of War", one of his captivating series of historical novels on the Napoleonic War at sea. I doubt if Hollywood will ever make a movie of that, and in fact Hollywood altered the plot of his 'Far Side of the World', in the rather poor film of that name, so that an Anglo-American battle was replaced by a historically impossible Anglo-French one.

On land the honours were more even. Visitors to Niagara Falls, on the Canadian side, can also see a surprising monument, taller than Nelson's Column, just along the Niagara River at Queenston Heights. This commemorates the British General Isaac Brock who died while defeating an attempted American invasion of Canada at this spot. Brock had earlier captured Detroit from the USA. Imagine what would have happened to the car business, or the music trade, if we hadn't given it back later.

Most people have some vague idea that British troops burned the White House and the Capitol in Washington (they did, in reprisal for an American raid on what is now Toronto), but few now have any idea of how extensive this conflict was, or how bloody. Its last gasp was at the extreme opposite end of the country, the pointless Battle of New Orleans, fought after a peace treaty had already been signed but the generals did not know it.

That fierce little war was a sort of re-run of the original breach between Britain and America, now laughed over but very savage at the time. Many people in the American colonies did not support the revolt against King George, and these loyalists were cruelly treated after independence, sometimes murdered and in most cases forced from their homes. They went, mostly, to Canada to start new lives. Some of their descendants, rather like the Arabs driven from Israel in 1948, still keep the keys or deeds to the houses from which their forefathers were driven.

The two countries were at each other's throats many times in the 19th century. Powerful forces in Washington wanted to annexe Canada and much British diplomacy was needed to prevent this. A dispute over the frontier in the far North-West almost led to gunfire in the 1850s. And Britain came close to intervening openly on the side of the Confederacy in the American Civil War. A British shipyard built the Confederate raider CSS Alabama, which did terrible damage to the North's shipping. The victorious North did not forget, and sued Britain for the then enormous sum of £3 million in compensation. There was real resentment and anger over this. Senator Charles Sumner, Chairman of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee, said Britain's breach of neutrality was so serious that it had doubled the length of the war, and that Britain ought to hand over Canada to the USA as redress.

The idea that the two great English-speaking powers are eternal friends and allies is quite a new one. British diplomats in Washington (notably Cecil Spring Rice, author of 'I vow to thee, my country") worked night and day to try to get America to intervene in World War One, and Britain later paid the price when President Woodrow Wilson insisted on the right to decide the peace terms, often in ways which did not suit Britain at all, upsetting cosy secret deals we had made in our old-fashioned way.

The Washington Naval Treaty, more or less forced on Britain by the US in 1921, effectively ended Britain's days as the world's greatest sea-power. The Americans made it clear that they could and would outbuild us if we did not agree to stop launching new capital ships. (We fought World War two with ancient or underpowered warships as a result, one reason for the disaster when the Bismarck sank the beautiful but poorly armoured HMS Hood). It also ended the Anglo-Japanese alliance, which had long irritated Washington. Who knows how differently the world would now be arranged, if the British and the Japanese had remained allies and we had never lost Singapore?

Round about this time, American pressure also helped to push Britain into an unwelcome surrender to Irish Republicanism.

Between the wars The USA also looked unsympathetically on the British Empire, and on its special trading arrangements, viewing it as an obstacle and a rival. American 'anti-colonialism' (which conveniently forgets that the continental USA is itself a land empire obtained by conquest or by purchase of the conquests of others), plus Irish-American dislike of Britain, kept relations fairly cool. It was precisely because of this that King George VI visited the USA in June 1939, to try to warm up a frigid relationship as war approached.

Franklin Roosevelt did not help Britain in 1939 out of sentimentality. The Lend-Lease package was an act of hard self-interest, designed to keep Britain in the war and to keep her still-powerful fleet out of the hands of the Germans. The scheme was ended abruptly in September 1945, leaving many goods still in transit. Britain expects to pay off the debt for this aid in December of this year (2006). If Britain had fallen, it is conceivable that the Third Reich would have been able to combine the British and French navies with its own into a major challenge for control of the Atlantic, and eventually the Pacific too. Had Hitler then gone on to defeat the USSR, the USA would have faced a world power quite capable of threatening it on two flanks. Alaska, remember, almost touches Siberia, and there are old Russian settlements even now in California. In those circumstances, isolation would not have been safe or wise for the USA.

Winston Churchill understood this perfectly well, and blatantly used the threat of the Royal Navy falling into Hitler's hands to bargain for help.

The USA did not exactly rush wholeheartedly to Britain's aid. Millions of German-Americans, and plenty of Irish-Americans, with significant votes in important states, were far from sympathetic. Many people still believe that the USA declared war on Nazi Germany. But this never happened. Hitler declared war on the USA, in obedience to his pact with Japan, soon after Pearl Harbor. America, again quite reasonably, fought a cynical and self-interested war, letting Britain and the USSR take most of the burden of the fight against Hitler, while it concentrated on the great sea-battles and land-battles ( largely unknown in Britain) which ensured the defeat of Japan. This is not to deny the valour of the American servicemen who fought in Europe, which was great, simply to point out that they were fighting in their own interests, not in response to some sort of international blood tie. Interestingly, much less is said about the tremendous ( and far more selfless) Canadian contribution in 1939-45, especially at sea.

The great power summit in Teheran in 1943, where Roosevelt snubbed Churchill and sucked up to Stalin, was a warning - which Churchill heeded - that Britain's usefulness to the USA was declining. The two men, Churchill and Roosevelt are supposed to have been great friends. But there is evidence that this was not so, and Churchill, a frequent traveller to the USA, significantly did not attend Roosevelt's funeral in 1945.

After the war, with lend-lease aid cut off abruptly within weeks of Japan's surrender, Britain had to plead with the USA for help - and got it once again, including generous Marshall Aid (much of it unwisely squandered on a Welfare State we couldn't afford), but at a price. The pound sterling had to be devalued, the Empire had to open its markets up to US trade. And it was quite clear that the British Empire had to come to an end as well, not least because under these conditions we simply could not afford to maintain it. The scuttle from India, and the scuttle from Palestine, both happened because we could no longer afford to be an imperial or colonial power.

Our conflict with Iran, over the price we paid for Iranian oil, also arose out of national near-bankruptcy which rather suited the booming USA . This led to the disastrous CIA-MI6 coup against the Iranian leader Mossadeq, which has poisoned relations between the west and Iran ever since.

It is worth remembering that for some years after 1945 the US State Department regarded Britain, not the USSR, as America's principal rival in the world. Churchill, seeing this, sought to alert America to the Soviet threat so as to rekindle the 1939-45 alliance, a great success for as long as the Cold War lasted, but only so long as we behaved ourselves as the Americans thought we should.

And then of course there was Suez. I don't think this was America's fault. I think it was the fault of British politicians who hadn't bothered to understand the post-Teheran world order.

It was an adventure embarked on by a silly, weak, Prime Minister, anxious to prove he was a major world figure, who mistook an Arab demagogue for a re-incarnated Fascist Dictator (remind you of anyone?). In this, Anthony Eden was encouraged by Harold Macmillan, another lightweight who entirely misunderstood President Eisenhower, having believed the wartime alliance was a deep friendship. "Ike will lie doggo", Macmillan wrongly predicted when ministers discussed the likely American reaction to the Suez plan. Macmillan, as Chancellor, later had to tell the same ministers that furious and effective American financial pressure threatened to make us bankrupt unless we abandoned the Suez operation he himself had keenly supported. How did this man become Prime Minister?

Since then, America has put unrelenting pressure on Britain to integrate with the EU, a fact that many neo-conservative Eurosceptics find it difficult to cope with. It has shown little understanding of our historic differences with the Continent and our desire for national sovereignty.

And I was present during the tense months in Washington DC when the supposedly mighty British Embassy was repeatedly humiliated by President Bill Clinton and his staff, who decided to give respectability and political backing to Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams, to pay off domestic political debts which they saw as far more important than any obligations to Britain. Clinton's aides ( as one of them told me) viewed Britain as a sort of Yugoslavia, a backward country where they were entitled to intervene. This intervention led directly to Britain's greatest diplomatic and political humiliation since Suez, the surrender to the IRA at Easter 1998. Antony Blair got away with this because the British media fell for the ludicrous spin that it was a victory for peace and goodwill, and mostly didn't read the agreement and still haven't. It was a grovelling, one-sided capitulation. Would an enemy have treated us any worse than this old friend?

I repeat, I love America, think we have much to learn from her, am endlessly glad that she exists, I like Americans and enjoy many aspects of American culture. My heart always lifts when I arrive there and sinks when I have to leave again. But I do not regard her as a reliable ally of Britain. And why should I expect to? It was the great British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, who pointed out that great powers had "no eternal friends, only eternal interests".